There have been recent calls for a shift to an evidence-based paradigm in environmental management, grounded in systematic monitoring and evaluation, but achieving this will be complex and difficult. Evaluating the educational components of environmental initiatives presents particular challenges, because these programs often have multiple concurrent goals and may value 'human outcomes', such a...

The Medicare Beneficiary Health Status Registry (MBHSR) is a proposed new survey program that would collect health status indicators annually from large probability samples of Medicine beneficiaries. For reasons of economy, the MBHSR would use mail survey procedures with telephone follow-up of nonrespondents. Because of concerns about response rates and the validity and reliability of the data ...

Concerns about rising health care costs and the often incremental nature of improvements in health outcomes continue to fuel intense debates about 'progress' and 'value' in cancer research. In times of tightening fiscal constraints, it is increasingly important for patients and their representatives to define what constitutes 'value' to them. It is clear that diverse stakeholders have different...

PURPOSE To validate a survey research measure of subjective income, as measured by perceived income adequacy, in an international context. DESIGN AND METHODS The study population comprised persons aged 50 years and older in 12 countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (n = 28,939). Perceived difficulty in making ends meet was regressed on sociodemographic variables,...

Levels and causes of mortality in mothers and babies are intrinsically linked, occurring at the same time and often to the same mother-baby dyad, although mortality rates are substantially higher in babies. Measuring levels, trends and causes of maternal, neonatal and foetal mortality are important for understanding priority areas for interventions and tracking the success of interventions at t...

In this paper, we investigate the link between the formal definition of confidence in tendency surveys and its measurement. We advocate for the use of reflective measures in an assessment of the confidence level in both consumer and industrial indicators. Based on the data from Poland's tendency survey research, we use a multi-group confirmatory factor analytical approach to demonstrate that th...

OBJECTIVE To position the concept of sustainability within the context of food security. DESIGN An overview of the interrelationships between food security and sustainability based on a non-systematic literature review and informed discussions based principally on a quasi-historical approach from meetings and reports. SETTING International and global food security and nutrition. RESULTS T...

OBJECTIVE To investigate inequalities in personal health conditions and in the utilization of healthcare services according in relation to the individual's status in the labor market. METHODS This study was based on 39,925 males aged 15 to 64 years living in 10 Brazilian metropolitan regions, who took part in the 1998 National Household Survey. They were classified as formal labor, informal l...

BACKGROUND Recently, quality is a serious concern in development of organizations. There are various indicators to assess quality and the purpose of this study was to identify the main indicators for quality measurement of Iranian health centers. METHODS This qualitative study was conducted in three stages: first, review of the literature was performed to identify different indicators for qua...

The identifi cation and assessment of systemic risks is a core function of macro-prudential supervision. There are four broad approaches for analytical models and tools that can support this function. The fi rst three each aim to detect early one of the three main forms of systemic risk, namely the endogenous build-up and unravelling of widespread imbalances, exogenous aggregate shocks and cont...